King Barry's, Romney's, Newt's, Perry's and "the Donald's" buddies at work and play... Can we stand for any more as they weaken the $$$ further and further bailing each other out?

When will people get it? THE FED CARTEL DOESN'T WORK FOR US!

RON PAUL 2012!!!!

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/secrets-bailout-now-told-122008831.html

Secrets of the Bailout, Now Told

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON | New York Times – 10 hours ago

A  FRESH account emerged last week about the magnitude of financial aid that the Federal Reserve bestowed on big banks during the 2008-09 credit crisis. The report came from Bloomberg News, which had to mount a lengthy legal fight to wrest documents from the Fed that detailed its rescue efforts.

It is dispiriting, of course, that we are still learning about the billions provided to various financial firms during the crisis. Another sad element to this mess is that getting the truth requires the legal firepower of an organization as rich as Bloomberg.

But that’s the way our world works. Billions are secretly showered on troubled financial institutions to stave off disaster. Individuals get little or no help.

Here are some of the new figures:

Among all the rescue programs set up by the Fed, $7.77 trillion in commitments were outstanding as of March 2009, Bloomberg said. The nation’s six largest banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — borrowed almost half a trillion dollars from the Fed at peak periods, Bloomberg calculated, using the central bank’s data.

Those six institutions accounted for 63 percent of the average daily borrowings from the Fed by all publicly traded United States banks, money management and investment firms, Bloomberg said.

Numbers for individual companies were equally astonishing. For example, the Fed provided Bear Stearns with $30 billion to see it through its 2008 shotgun marriage with JPMorgan. This was in addition to the $29.5 billion in assets purchased by the Fed from Bear to assist in the buyout by JPMorgan. Citigroup, meanwhile, tapped the Fed for almost $100 billion in January 2009 — its peak during the crisis — and Morgan Stanley received $107 billion in Fed loans in September 2008.

Some may see all this as ancient history or as ho-hum disclosures that confirm what everybody already knew — that our banks were on the precipice and that only hundreds of billions of dollars could save them. The Fed says that the money it lent in these programs was paid back without generating any losses.

But the information is revealing nonetheless. The fact is, investors didn’t know how dire the situation was at these institutions. At the same time that these banks were privately thronging the teller windows at the Fed, some of their executives were publicly espousing their firms’ financial solidity.

During the first three months of 2009, for example, when Citigroup’s Fed borrowing apparently peaked, Vikram Pandit, its chief executive, hailed the company’s performance. Calling that first quarter the best over all since 2007, Mr. Pandit said the results showed “the strength of Citi’s franchise.”

Citi’s earnings release didn’t detail its large Fed borrowings; neither did its filing for the first quarter of 2009 with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Other banks kept silent on these activities or mentioned them in passing with few specifics.

These disclosure lapses are disturbing to Lynn E. Turner, a former chief accountant at the S.E.C. Since 1989, he said, commission rules have required public companies to disclose details about material federal assistance they receive. The rules grew out of the savings and loan crisis, during which hundreds of banks failed and others received government help.

The rules are found in a section of the S.E.C.’s Codification of Financial Reporting Policies titled “Effects of Federal Financial Assistance Upon Operations.” They state that if any types of federal financial assistance have “materially affected or are reasonably likely to have a future material effect upon financial condition or results of operations, the management discussion and analysis should provide disclosure of the nature, amounts and effects of such assistance.”

Given these rules, Mr. Turner said: “I would have expected some discussion in the management discussion and analysis of how this has had a positive impact on these banks’ operating results. The borrowings had to have an impact on their liquidity and earnings, but I don’t ever recall anybody saying ‘we borrowed a bunch of money from the Fed at zero percent interest.’ ”

I asked officials at Citigroup and Morgan Stanley about these disclosures. Jon Diat, a spokesman for Citigroup, said the bank’s disclosures in its quarterly filings with the S.E.C. “were entirely appropriate.” He added that Citi and other financial services firms “utilized numerous government programs that provided significant funding capacity and liquidity support which helped increase the flow of credit into the economy.”

Morgan Stanley pointed to its annual report for 2008, which mentioned the various Fed programs and the bank’s ability to tap them. The filing noted that the Fed was authorized to extend credit to Morgan Stanley’s broker-dealer units in both the United States and Britain but contained no dollar amounts used.

Of course, there is stigma associated with a company tapping into federal assistance programs. This is the Fed’s main argument for keeping its operations under wraps. And companies want to avoid frightening investors by disclosing their reliance on this type of emergency cash, even if it is only temporary.

But keeping this information from shareholders is no way to engender their trust. And a lack of investor confidence often translates to depressed valuations among companies’ shares. If investors doubt that a company is coming clean about its financial standing — the current worry is how exposed our banks are to European debt woes — its stock price will suffer. This is very likely one of the reasons that big bank stocks trade at such low price-to-earnings multiples today.

It will be interesting to see whether the S.E.C. does anything to enforce its rules that companies disclose federal assistance in financial filings, either in the recent past or in the future. You could certainly argue that requiring such disclosures is even more important nowadays, given that so many banks are considered too big to fail and that the taxpayer will undoubtedly be asked once again to rescue them from their mistakes.

“These banks and the Fed have never believed in transparency,” Mr. Turner said. “I actually think their thought process is sorely flawed. If the banks knew this stuff was going to be made public they’d behave differently. Instead of runs on the bank you’d have bankers doing things intelligently to avoid getting into trouble.”

What an idea!

After more than two years, details of the largest bailout in U.S. history have finally been exposed. The Federal Reserve fought to keep secret the details of its bailout for the banking industry, telling no one which banks were in trouble while bankers taking billions of dollars in emergency loans continued to assure investors that their firms were healthy. Now the truth comes out.

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From 29,000 pages of Federal Reserve documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions, Bloomberg News has ascertained that not only were big banks saved by the Fed, but they actually reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the central bank’s below-market rates.

Fed officials claim that almost all of the loans have been repaid and that the government has incurred no losses as a result of the bailout, but details suggest taxpayers are paying for the bailout in other ways, namely perpetuating a broken status quo while enabling the biggest banks to grow even bigger.

Saved by the bailout, big banks turned around and lobbied against new government regulations meant to prevent another collapse, a job made easier by the fact that the Fed never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers. The sheer size of the bailout has only now come to light after Bloomberg LP won a court case against the Fed and a group of the biggest U.S. banks called Clearing House Association LLC to force lending details into the open.

In total, the central bank had committed $7.77 trillion to banks as of March 2009, dwarfing the Treasury Department’s better-known and highly controversial $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, notes that at least TARP “had some strings attached,” referring to the program’s executive-pay ceiling, while the Fed program had nothing.

The new information shows that some of the nation’s biggest banks were assuring investors of their stability while secretly borrowing billions from the central bank to stay afloat. Bank of America CEO Kenneth D. Lewis wrote to shareholders that he headed “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world,” on November 26, 2008. The firm owed the central bank $86 billion that day.

While JPMorgan told shareholders on March 26, 2010 that it had used the Fed’s Term Auction Facility “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system,” the bank did not mention that it had borrowed almost twice its cash holdings from TAF, or that its peak borrowing of $48 billion on February 26, 2009 came more than a year after the program’s creation.

By the end of 2008, the central bank had established or expanded 11 lending facilities catering to banks, securities firms, and corporations that couldn’t get short-term loans from traditional sources.

“Supporting financial-market stability in times of extreme market stress is a core function of central banks,” says William B. English, director of the Fed’s Division of Monetary Affairs. “Our lending programs served to prevent a collapse of the financial system and to keep credit flowing to American families and businesses.” The Fed claims all loans were backed by appropriate collateral and that the central bank didn’t lose any money.

The six biggest U.S. banks, which received $160 billion of TARP funds, borrowed as much as $460 billion from the Fed. The six — JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup , Wells Fargo , Goldman Sachs , and Morgan Stanley — accounted for 63% of the average daily debt to the Fed by all publicly traded U.S. banks, money managers, and investment-services firms. Before the bailout, they held roughly half of the industry’s assets.

While the central bank maintains that the bailout was necessary, it has been criticized for keeping the details of the bailout secret, allowing big banks to grow on false impressions of their financial soundness. Chairman Ben Bernanke said in an April 2009 speech that the Fed provided emergency loans only to “sound institutions,” but its internal assessments described at least one of the biggest borrowers — Citigroup — as “marginal.”

Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who chaired the House Financial Services Committee and co-sponsored the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, says that he was kept in the dark as to the Fed’s monetary policy. “We were aware emergency efforts were going on,” Frank said. “We didn’t know the specifics.” Congress debated the Dodd-Frank legislation in 2010 without a full understanding of how deeply the banks had depended on the Fed for survival.

Ted Kaufman, a former Democratic Senator from Delaware, says that, had Congress been aware of the extent of the Fed rescue, he would have been able to line up more support for breaking up the biggest banks. According to Kaufman, the cost of borrowing is less for too-big-to-fail banks than for smaller firms because lenders believe the government won’t let them go under. They then take greater risks because they’ll enjoy any profits while shifting losses to taxpayers.

Byron L. Dorgan, a former Democratic senator from North Dakota, says the information might have helped pass legislation to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, which for most of the last century separated customer deposits from the riskier practices of investment banking.

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Instead, the Fed helped America’s biggest financial firms grow even bigger. Total assets held by the six biggest banks grew 39% to $9.5 trillion as of September 30, from $6.8 trillion on the same day in 2006, before the crisis began. Now many of the nation’s biggest banks remain too big to fail. Kaufman fears another crisis if big banks continue to take big risks, landing themselves in a situation that would again require taxpayers to bail them out because their failure would wreak havoc on the economy.